On the surface, today’s employment numbers simply continue a recent trend: employers added some jobs but not enough to keep pace with Canada’s growing labour force. As a result, unemployment edged back up to 7%. But just below the surface were some even worse developments. Employers actually cut 29,000 full-time
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Joseph Stiglitz offers his suggestions (PDF) for a tax system which would encourage both growth and equality: Tax reform…offers a path toward both resolving budgetary impasses and making the kinds of public investments that will strengthen the fundamentals of the economy. The most
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Assorted content to end your week. – Polly Toynbee looks at how the UK is now treating children in need as investment opportunities to be exploited by investors, rather than people to be assisted. And Mark Taliano writes that privatization is a problem rather than a solution when it comes
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – George Monbiot writes that contrary to the theory that wealth is a precondition to environmental standards, increased consumption tends to correlate to disregard for the our impact on the environment: For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Andrew Jackson reviews Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, while Paul Mason offers a useful summary. And David Atkins applies its most important lesson in response to some typical right-wing spin prioritizing assets over incomes: (I)nstead of doing something about radical inequality,
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Women’s Work
My mother says that when she graduated from high school in 1972, she had two occupational choices: nurse or teacher. Nurse and teacher are still the most popular choices for women entering the workforce. Statistics Canada said that more than 20% of all female university graduates in 2011 were teachers
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Paul Krugman’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century includes his commentary on our new gilded age: Still, today’s economic elite is very different from that of the nineteenth century, isn’t it? Back then, great wealth tended to be inherited;
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Krugman points out how the U.S.’ corporate elites are agitating to make sure that any economic recovery helps only those at the top, rather than reaching most workers in the form of wage increases: Suddenly, it seems as if all the serious
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Why the Minimum Wage Debate Isn’t Going to Go Away
Yesterday I tweeted this: <blink> Gap will raise minimum hourly pay Walmart “looking” at support of min wage raise In honour of the momentum, I am posting the piece I wrote for Economy Lab a while back, and including the numbers that drive the chart that attracted quite a lot
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jim Stanford discusses how unions and collective bargaining improve the standard of living for everybody: The following figure illustrates the broad negative correlation between bargaining coverage and poverty: that is, the higher is bargaining coverage, the lower is relative poverty (and the more
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Dutch Disease, Prices and Wages in Saskatchewan
Jim Stanford recently pointed out that many of the conservative economists who had defended the overvalued loonie have quickly shifted to applauding its depreciation. The Government of Saskatchewan may be making a similar conversion on the road to Damascus. When federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair expressed concern about Dutch disease,
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Problematic sources of recent real wage growth
The past 18 months have seen real wages increase in Canada. (Yes, I double-checked.) Indeed, real wages have gone through two distinct phases of growth since the financial crisis hit the global economy in 2007. This may be surprising as we have been accustomed to hearing about the stagnation of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jo Snyder discusses how poverty makes everybody less healthy, and recognizes the need for higher basic wages as a result. And Laurie Penny highlights the futility of trying to badger young adults into service jobs which offer no opportunity for personal, professional
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: StatCan Debunks Small-Business Mythology
Canadian economic commentators often worship small business as the supposed source of economic dynamism and growth. This cult of small business has greatly influenced public policy, with federal and provincial governments giving huge tax preferences to small corporations. But new Statistics Canada research finds: “The gap between the levels of
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Legislating a real raise: Minimum wages and real earnings growth
In a recent post titled, “What happened to the distribution of real earnings during the recession?”, Stephen Gordon presents a graphs that shows some significant growth in real (adjust for inflation) earnings in Canada between 2007 and 2012. In addition, plotting average annual growth rates in real earnings against the
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Raise Wages, Train Workers
I have been hard on our new Employment and Social Development Minister, Jason Kenney, for buying into a widespread myth about labour shortages and skill mismatches in Canada. So, to give credit where credit is due, it appears Minister Kenney has been listening to the growing chorus of voices disputing the
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Fossil-Fueled GDP Growth
Yesterday, Statistics Canada reported that the Canadian economy had a month of fossil-fueled growth in August. Overall GDP was up by 0.3%, only half as much as in July but still a respectable monthly growth rate. By far the strongest growth of any industry was a 1.9% increase in “Mining,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – thwap highlights the cycle of austerity, stagnation and decline that’s marked the past few decades across much of the developed world. And Thomas Walkom recognizes that the economy is actually one of the Cons’ most glaring weaknesses – at least, if one thinks
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Part-Time Growth in a “Hamster Wheel” Job Market
Today, Statistics Canada reported that employment increased in August, although two-thirds of the additional jobs were part-time positions. The part-time rate rose to 19%, its highest level in more than a year. Job growth has also been “part-time” in the sense that only a few months this year have seen
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Inflation Eats Up Three-Quarters of Wage Gains
Today, Statistics Canada reported an annual inflation rate of 1.3% for July. By comparison, it reports that the average hourly wage rose by 1.8% between July 2012 and July 2013. In other words, even anemic inflation is eating up nearly three-quarters of wage increases. On average, Canadian workers have eked
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